Ryan O’Donnell
Your Case Plan by Sunlight – SEED Fall 2024
Published June 11, 2025
As part of our ‘Meet Our Founders’ series today, we introduce Ryan O’Donnell, Co-Founder and CEO of Your Case Plan by Sunlight based in Cary, NC. Sunlight is a tech for good company on a mission to strengthen America’s social safety net. The company’s first product, Your Case Plan, is built to reduce the number of days children are stuck in foster care by improving communication between everyone involved in child welfare cases.
Q: What problem are you trying to solve and what influenced you to start your company?
A: We’re on a mission to strengthen America’s social safety net, starting with our broken child welfare system. We started Sunlight after seeing our country’s child welfare system up close and personal. My wife and I were foster parents in Durham County and we saw how the system routinely fails children and their families. In our foster son’s case, he spent nearly seven years in foster care even though he had a father and several family members willing and capable of raising him. After selling my first start-up, we invested over $250K in a variety of projects and products focused on strengthening families and keeping kids safe. After working alongside hundreds of people impacted by the system over two years, we saw how communication breakdowns, staffing issues, and lack of access to high quality legal representation made things worse. This led to the creation of our first product, Your Case Plan, which is built to reduce the number of days children are stuck in foster care.
Q: How will your NC IDEA grant funds advance your company?
A: NC IDEA will help Sunlight unlock our next phase of growth and enable us to serve more families and children in our country’s foster care system. We will be using our NC IDEA grant to double down on product development, marketing, and customer success. This allows us to best serve our first statewide customer, Oklahoma, as well as expand to serve North Carolina and additional states. We’re excited to use these funds to launch new integrations with existing case management systems to help families connect with their attorneys, caseworkers and more.
Q: When did you know you wanted to take an entrepreneurial path?
A: Entrepreneurs love to solve problems and I knew I wanted to build start-ups that help other people since I was a high school student at the NC School of Science and Math. Back then, I helped lead our school’s Guinness World Record food drive, which raised 559,885 pounds of food in under 24 hours. We all felt on top of the world when we broke the record but that day ignited a spark in me after hearing that food would only last a few hours — the need too great. Ever since then, I’ve been doing my best to find ways to use tech for good and started my first company when I was a student at NC State University.
Q: What other passions do you have besides your business?
A: Between our two families, my cofounder and I have four boys under four, which keeps us all pretty busy going to things like the Museum of Life and Science in Durham and the new Downtown Cary Park. One of our side projects is called First Chance Housing which uses real estate to solve the “foster care to homelessness pipeline.” Outside of my child welfare work, I love spending time coaching the next generation of entrepreneurs studying at NCSSM and NCSU.
While visiting the Research Triangle area, Ryan recommends:
- If you’re coming to the Research Triangle area, I highly recommend making time to go to a Durham Bulls game or visiting one of our beautiful universities. If you’re in the mood for some great food, plan on making a trip to M Sushi, Bida Manda, or MOFU Shoppe.
Support Sunlight and Ryan by:
- We’re constantly on the lookout for talented people who want to go above and beyond to help other people. Good enough isn’t good enough for us. If you or someone you know has experience working in SaaS or social services, connect with me and follow our company on LinkedIn. Also, if you or someone you know happens to work in local/state government, the child welfare system, or the media, we would love to share more about what we’re building. We all need to work together to support children and families in North Carolina and beyond.
